


If You Can’t Take The Heat

by ion_bond



Category: Black Donnellys, Daredevil (Comics)
Genre: Change your life!, Crossover, Gen, Hell's Kitchen, Humor, Organized Crime
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-03-15
Updated: 2009-03-15
Packaged: 2018-03-24 19:26:50
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,396
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3781582
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"He’s from the Kitchen. Don’t they say that? He’s like Jenny from the fuckin’ block."</p><p>Jimmy and Kevin Donnelly know that they must know Daredevil. They just don’t know who he is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Can’t Take The Heat

**Author's Note:**

> This is technically comic-book Daredevil, but I think it's accessible to fans of the show.

People were constantly telling Jimmy to change his life. His ma, his girlfriend, his priest, the fucking union shop steward. He heard it from his brother Tommy at least twice a week. Usually, though, none of these people dressed up in a devil costume or put a foot on Jimmy’s windpipe when they said it. Usually, the people who lectured him had his best interests at heart.

“You don’t think he had your best interests at heart?” Kevin said. “I mean, you were out there trying to score, right?”

“I wasn’t trying to fucking score,” Jimmy said. “Shut the fuck up. I’m telling the story.”

Jimmy was sitting with Whitey, his business partner, at the end of the bar, the end furthest from the front windows where the sunlight didn’t reach. Not a morning person under the best of circumstances, Jimmy felt shakier than he wanted to admit, even now, hours after the encounter in the alley. There was one good thing about owning a money-sucking falling-down dive like the Firecracker Lounge, and that was the fact that that the dry hours between last call at 3:30 AM and opening at eleven no longer applied to him. He could have a beer at whatever time of day he felt like it.

It was around nine in the morning now, and the front door was locked. Jimmy’s brother Kevin was on his knees in front of the jukebox, one eye squinched shut, looking up the jammed chute by which -- in theory -- the customer’s change was returned. “But we’re not talking about the Green Goblin or Spider-Man or something,” Kevin said. “He’s a good guy.”

The tone of admiration in his voice was really getting on Jimmy’s nerves. “Hey, you want me to hit you? Shut up!”

Kevin sat back on his heels. “I’m just saying, it’s Daredevil. I don’t think he wants--”

Jimmy slid off his stool and crossed the room. “Do I have to spell it out for you, Kevin? He wants the territory. The protection racket. The book.“

“Really?” Whitey spoke up. “Did he actually come out and say that?”

“You guys don’t believe what I’m telling you?”

“No, man.” Whitey shrugged. “That’s not it. I’m just trying to figure out what he threatened and what you, uh, intuited. OK? So, do you remember exactly what he said?”

Stupid question, Jimmy thought, picturing the alley last night. He didn’t think he was ever going to be able to forget it.

The Devil. The big guy had loomed above him as they both listened to the sound of Jimmy’s chickenshit dealer’s footfalls fading into the distance. Jimmy was 5’7”, even when he wasn’t lying flat on his back in an alley with his shirt getting wet and sticky from spilled god-knows-what, and Hell’s Kitchen’s personal superhero was probably half a foot taller, and standing. Jimmy was scared out of his mind.

“Change your life!” he had said, bootheel to Jimmy’s jugular. The voice was pitched so low it was almost a growl. He sounded like Christian Bale playing Batman, only unlike Christian Bale, this wasn’t funny, not at all. No one was playing. This was real.

What really got Jimmy was the anger. Busting up drug deals was this guy’s bread-and-butter, right? Getting pissed off about it should have been above his pay-grade. But Jimmy could still hear the words now, genuinely mad. Those three words were terrifying. “Change your life!” That was it. You would have had to be there to understand.

But no one had been there. He couldn’t tell them.

“He said the Kitchen belonged to him,” Jimmy said. “He said not to Wilson Fisk, not to Alo Onatero, and not to the Donnelly brothers.”

“’The Donnelly brothers,’” Kevin echoed. “He said that? Brothers?”

Whitey snaked his arm around the tap to top off his beer. “In the same breath as the Kingpin? Shit, that’s big, Jimmy. He knows who you guys are.”

“’Course he does, dumbass -- we’re makin’ us a name. Besides, he’s from here, whoever he is -- from the Kitchen. Don’t they say that? He’s like Jenny from the fuckin’ block.”

“Now her, I wouldn’t mind seeing in red leather,” Whitey said. “J-Lo can step on my neck any time.”

OK, Jimmy thought, he should have known better than to tell them the stepped-on detail. But Whitey was right. Under different circumstances ...

Kevin broke into this pleasant reverie by thumping hard on the front of the jukebox. “The Donnelly brothers.” he repeated again. “Man, I can’t get over that. I wonder what Tommy and Sean’ll think.”

“Who the fuck cares? You guys aren’t seeing the point, which is that I’m not going to let some pumped-up thug in a mask order me around!” Jimmy pulled himself up onto the pool table and stood tall. “You hear me? You, Kevin, are not telling Seanny and you are definitely not telling Saint fucking Thomas, but we’re gonna have to do something about this guy!” He dropped back to the felt, thinking. “He’s supposed to be a lawyer or something. Bugle did a thing about him, a couple of years back, and I heard his name before, too. You know, that guy got Randy Quinn off when they brought him up on a bullshit murder charge?”

“Murdock,” Kevin supplied. “From Nelson and Murdock. They got a storefront office on 7th Ave somewhere on the forty block -- 45th, maybe?”

Jimmy believed it. His brother wasn’t the brightest bulb in the pack, but he had a weirdly good memory for details. “Right,” he said.

“No,” Whitey said. “Daredevil is not Matt Murdock. No way. I don’t care what the Bugle printed. I was in that guy’s class all through school. First of all, he was kind of a pussy, always getting jumped, never fighting back. Not exactly the Boy Without Fear. He was skinny as hell, too. Second, I can personally vouch for the fact that Murdock really is blind. I remember he got in some accident. It was a big deal at the time -- Ed Koch gave him a medal. He missed half of fifth grade, came back bumping into shit. If he’s faking it, he’s been faking it for a very long time, longer than anybody could.”

Jimmy smirked. “You made it all the way through fifth grade?”

“You bet I did.” Whitey grinned. “Fuckin’ P.S. 111. How do you think I learned to calculate odds?”

“Dude,” Kevin said. “Whitey’s right. They took a picture of him. The real Daredevil, at the trial of that Murdock guy. They can’t be the same person.”

They all sat, considering. After a minute, Kevin gave up on the jukebox and went behind the bar to restack the glasses. Jimmy hoped Kevin would be careful. He'd just had to get a bunch of new ones.

“Don’t you think we probably know him?” Kevin said. “He goes into Chelsea and SoHo sometimes, but he pretty much sticks to Clinton. Why would he bother with us if he wasn’t a neighborhood guy? And if he is, we know him. He’s gotta be someone we came up with, right?”

Jimmy whistled. “Holy crap.” This actually made sense.

“He’s a little older than you guys,” Whitey said. “He’s been doing this since you were in middle school, Jimmy. And he’s Murdock’s friend, if he showed for the trial. He’s gotta be around that same age. My age.”

Amazed by this deductive reasoning, Jimmy jumped down off the table and slung an arm around Whitey’s neck, trying to maneuver the bigger man into a headlock. “Is it you, buddy? You been busy saving the world from junkies and crooks?”

“Yeah yeah, you’re on to me,” Whitey shoved him away. “This beer gut is my civilian disguise.”

“Seriously, though,” Kevin asked, clashing glasses together in excitement. “What did he look like?”

“He was wearing a mask, idiot.”

“Well, his chin sticks out. He’s white, right? Is he Irish?”

“He didn’t sound Italian.”

“And did he look Whitey’s age, or older?”

“I dunno.” Jimmy pictured the shadow dropping down from the fire-escape. “He moved real good.”

Kevin paused in his stacking. “Holy shit! What if it’s Dokey?”

“Don’t be retarded. Toe-chopping gangster by day, masked crimefighter by night? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“Yeah, but he didn’t say Dokey’s name, did he?” Whitey broke in. He spread his hands out flat on the bar. “He talks about Fisk and Alo, and then he mentions you guys before -- no offense -- the real Irish power in the neighborhood. That’s pretty weird. You think Dokey’s trying to scare you out of his territory?”

“He’s not fucking Dokey, OK?” Embroidering the exchange a little was one thing, but Jimmy knew he had to kill this before it got out of hand. “I would have recognized Dokey. I know what his chin looks like.” He tapped a bottle cap on the scratched surface of the bar. “Besides, I think Daredevil actually mentioned Dokey’s name too. I just forgot to say it before.”

“You don’t forget Dokey Farrell,” Whitey said -- a little suspiciously, Jimmy thought.

“OK, so it’s not Dokey,” his brother jumped in. “Where does that leave us?”

“Murdock,” Whitey said. “You gotta go pay him a visit, persuade him to tell you who his friend in the costume is.”

Shit. That would be a good plan if Jimmy had any desire whatsoever to find out Daredevil’s identity. In fact, he hoped he never saw the guy again in his life. How could he get out of this?

“It’s like you said before,” Kevin said excitedly. “If he’s calling us out, we’ve gotta get him back.”

Just great, Jimmy thought. He was always getting stuck doing stupid shit to save face.

And the other thing Tommy was always telling him, when he wasn’t busy telling him to get off the junk or control his temper, or to stop going through money like it was going out of style, was that lying bites you in the ass every time.

 

THE NEXT DAY:

Foggy noticed that there was someone outside when he came in -- or more accurately, when he thought about it later, he remembered there had been someone. The young man with curly hair was slumped just to the left of the street door, leaning against the standpipe that jutted out of the building’s brick front. He was wearing jeans and a canvas duffel coat, and something about him gave Foggy the fleeting impression that he was nervous.

That was really all he picked up on. His concentration was elsewhere; his lunch was in a styrofoam container in the bag he was carrying, and you didn’t have to have super-senses to smell the curry.

Matt was at the Manhattan Detention Center talking to a potential witness today and Becky had gone to have lunch with an old college friend, so Foggy had walked all the way over to a Jamaican place on the east side and back by himself, trying to get his one thousand steps in. He hung up his coat on the rack inside the door, his thoughts focused on beverages. There was the bottle of Strawberry Kiwi Snapple he’d left in the fridge, but no cola. He wondered whether he should make another pot of coffee. Matt usually didn’t drink coffee after noon, but Becky would.

The small reception area was quiet. Foggy put down his bag. “Hey, Crow. Want coffee?”

The intern hastily dropped her cell phone into her lap. She had stayed here alone to cover the desk for the secretary while she went on break, and Foggy didn’t blame her if she had been texting her friends to break the tedium. “Oh, hi Mr. Nelson. Should I make some?”

“No, that’s OK. I’ll do it myself, so long as you promise me you’ll help drink it.”

“No worries about that.” Crow smiled at him briefly. She was pretty -- and, Foggy reminded himself, way, way too young for him. Way too young. She stood up. “Um, Mr. Nelson? Before you go, I had a question for you.” She came around the desk and glanced down the empty hallway that led to the rear offices before lowering her voice. “This is kind of weird, but I think there’s a guy in the bathroom.”

“Huh?”

“He’s been in there for sort of a long time, and I didn’t know what to do. He came in while you were gone and asked to see Mr. Murdock. I told him he wouldn’t be back until later, but that he could wait to see you. He said OK, but he didn’t really seem like he wanted to wait here.” She gestured toward the chairs in front of the windows.

“He must not like three year old copies of Newsweek,” Foggy remarked. “Snob.”

Crow didn’t seem to know if she was allowed to laugh, or possibly she just didn’t think Foggy was funny. “Anyway, he asked where the bathroom was, and he’s been in there ever since. I, um, didn’t want to bother him.”

“Thanks,” Foggy said. “I’m on it.” He walked down the hall to the single-stall bathroom and knocked on the door. “Hello?”

“Just a second,” someone said from inside.

“Sorry,” Foggy called, feeling awkward. “Take your time.”

Given that he didn’t actually need to use the bathroom himself, he wasn’t sure of the etiquette. Should he linger outside to greet the unexpected visitor or should he slink off to his office and wait for him to be sent in? He stuck his head back around the corner. “Crow?”

“Mmm?”

“He said he wanted to see Matt specifically?”

“Yes.”

“And he didn’t have an appointment. Do you know if he’s a client?”

“I didn’t ask him,” she admitted. “I guess I probably should have.” She fiddled nervously with the pens in the mug on the desk.

Foggy felt like a jerk. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “You were only supposed to have to cover the phones.”

“I haven’t seen him before,” Crow offered. “And he seemed kind of relieved when I told him Mr. Murdock wasn’t here.”

“Huh.” Weird, Foggy thought. “Well, I’ll be at my desk. Tell him to come on back when he’s done.”

He had already finished his roti and was scraping off the inside of the styrofoam with his plastic fork when he heard the bathroom door open. He stepped out into the hallway just in front of their visitor, a short man with broad shoulders in a scuffed leather jacket, who had been moving toward the reception desk with an uneven gate.

“Hey,” Foogy said. “I’m Franklin Nelson. My partner is Matt Murdock, but he probably won’t he back until around four. Can I help you?”

“Yeah ...” said the man. He twisted his watch around on his wrist, looking from the exit over Foggy’s shoulder to the floor, always avoiding eye contact. While he was in the bathroom, Foggy had wondered if he might be a mutant or a mask -- an ally, or someone who wanted to hurt Matt. Either way, that would give the guy good reason to be nervous. Now, Foggy saw he was no one he recognized, and he didn’t have any kind of physical mutation. He just looked like a guy in his late twenties.

“What can I do for you?” Foggy tried again.

“I had, um, a legal question.”

“Right. But would you like to come into my office and sit down?”

“No!” the young man said wildly. He looked at his watch. “I have to go soon.”

Foggy was used to strange clients. “OK, I understand,” he said. “Shoot.”

He seemed to think for a moment. “Uh ... so, if police come to your apartment and they don’t have a warrant, but the person who answers the door lets them in, are they allowed to search?”

“Well, assuming that there’s no contraband in plain sight, the officers will need to determine that the individual at the door is in fact a resident of the apartment and has authorization to give consent. If so, they can search without a warrant.”

“Thanks,” said the young man distractedly, and punched Foggy in the jaw. “I always wanted to know that,” Foggy dimly heard him say.

He didn’t fall, but he was so surprised, he didn’t move as the man shoved past. After a minute, he pulled himself together and went around the corner to the reception area. Crow was on her feet behind the secretary’s desk, looking nonplussed. “That was so weird!” she said. “He just left without saying anything. I tried to get him to stop, but he wouldn’t.”

Through the front windows, they could see their visitor limping quickly down the sidewalk, followed by a man with curly hair, the one who had been outside earlier.

Foggy gingerly touched his face. “He didn’t hurt you, did he?”

“He didn’t even talk to me.” She looked at him more closely. “Are you all right?”

“Yeah, I’m fine.” He sighed. “Dakota will probably want to debrief us, though, when she and Matt get back. They’ll figure it out.”

“What do you think he wanted?” she asked.

“I guess he really had to use the bathroom.”

From the other room, he heard the last drips of coffee falling musically into the full pot. He knew there was a bag of corn in the freezer that he could put on his jaw. You couldn’t work here for years without picking up something.

“Coffee’s done,” he told the intern. “You want some?”

 

ONE WEEK LATER:

They were only there by chance -- them and Daredevil both, Kevin guessed.

As for him and Jimmy, they were finishing up with a collection from a juice bar on 38th and Sixth when they heard the tires squeal outside, followed by a crash and a sort of collective scream of fear and outrage, the kind that means something bad but apolitical has happened on a crowded street in Manhattan in the middle of the day. Everybody likes rubbernecking at a car wreck.

Jimmy, too. You’d think that after getting run over as a kid, he’d be extra-sensitive about car accidents, as he was about so much other stupid and random shit, but instead, he seemed to like them more than the average person did. He was out on the sidewalk without even counting the money, and Kevin followed behind him, of course, pushing his way through the crowd.

It was a two-car collision, right in the middle of the southbound lane -- a red Mitsubishi Eclipse and an old black Crown Vic, both of them smoking from the engines. “Woah!” said Jimmy, sounding almost jubilant. “Check this out!”

The windshields had shattered. There was safety glass all over the street. The driver of the Crown Vic -- the one that had gone over into the wrong lane -- was already opening his door, pushing his deflating airbag out of the way. He sat sideways in his seat with both feet out of the car, dazedly brushing pieces of glass out of his reddish crew cut, and Kevin was just starting to realize that he looked familiar when Jimmy punched him on the arm.

“Holy shit, Kev,” he said in a low voice. “That’s Lucas. Fucking Lucas O’Connor. Don’t say anything now. Look.” A marked patrol car was already pulling up behind the two wrecked vehicles, and Kevin could hear other sirens on the way. “How’d they get here so fast?” Jimmy asked.

The Midtown South Precinct was just a few blocks away, but it was still a good question. Kevin tapped the guy standing next to him on the shoulder. “Hey man, you see what happened?”

“Uh, yeah. The guy in the black car was driving really fast, I think the cops -- those ones, in that car -- were on him already.” Lucas O’Connor had been in Kevin’s high school class, and Kevin knew him well enough to give good odds that he’d stolen the wheels he was driving. “So, he punched the gas at the same time he swerved into the red car’s lane,” the man next to Kevin continued to explain. “It looked really bad, even though those people he hit weren’t speeding or anything.”

For the first time, Kevin looked over at the totaled Mitsubishi. There was a middle aged couple inside who looked Indian or something, although the woman in the passenger’s seat had dyed blond hair. Her head lolled to the side, and she wasn’t moving. Neither was the man.

“Fuck,” Jimmy whispered, and it took the sudden excited murmur from the crowd to make Kevin realize that he wasn’t talking about the injured people. He looked up.

And there was Daredevil, pushing his way through the onlookers the same way Jimmy and Kevin had done a few minutes before. He stepped down from the sidewalk into the street and scanned the crowd, the red lenses in his mask inscrutable. “Has someone called 911?”

The people around him shifted and muttered until a few people confirmed that they had. Kevin looked for the two officers from the patrol car. One of them had crossed to the far side of the avenue to direct traffic while her partner approached Lucas, hand on his gun. Kevin saw the second cop nod at Daredevil, like they were friends.

“Does anyone here know these people?” he asked. This time no one answered. His voice was deep, and he seemed bigger than Kevin had imagined and more intimidating. It was hard to explain why. He didn’t look like a giant action figure, but like a man with real muscles under his costume, muscles he had worked for. It was the way he stood, maybe.

Kevin had a sudden, terrible thought. “Do you think Matt Murdock remembered to talk to him?” he asked his brother.

An ambulance pulled up with a cry of sirens and parked behind the first police car. “He’d better have.” Jimmy looked pale, the way he did when he was scared or very angry. “I gave that man a beating he couldn’t have forgotten.”

“Really?” Kevin squeaked. Jimmy had made him wait outside the law office, that day, because he said that no muscle was needed for this one. Forty minutes later, Jimmy came half-running out of the building, looking flustered and out-of-breath, the way he always got after a fight. Kevin had wondered what had happened inside. That was a long time. All Jimmy would tell him, though, was that he and Murdock had reached an understanding and that Daredevil wouldn’t be giving them any more problems.

Now Kevin knew the whole story. “Dude, he’s blind, Jimmy,” he said. “That’s low.”

Fifteen feet away, near the driver’s side of the car, Daredevil turned his head in their direction, almost as if he were listening to them, but then he turned back to the man in the front seat, who had now regained consciousness. The paramedics were getting the woman out of the car on a stretcher. “Murdock needed to understand,” Jimmy insisted.

“Do you think he got mad when he found out?” Kevin said. He was whispering now, not that there was any way the Daredevil could hear him from here, superhero or no.

“Shut up.”

The crowd on the corner of 38th Street had only gotten bigger since Daredevil arrived. Now, police officers from two additional squad cars were on the sidewalk, trying to disperse them. Kevin and Jimmy stayed out of the way, watching the EMTs load the stretcher into the ambulance and help the husband into the back next to it. Lucas was standing, cuffed, near the trunk of his car, being questioned.

Kevin had become so engrossed in watching what was going on that he lost track of Daredevil. “Well,” someone said, and Kevin almost pissed himself when he saw who it was. He fantasized for a fleeting half-second about running for it, but it was already too late, and besides, Jimmy never would.

Daredevil stopped at the curb and stood still, waiting.

“We meet again.” Jimmy said bravely, his voice steady but a little loud.

Daredevil smiled slightly. Kevin was paying attention, now, and he saw that his brother had been right; this was not Dokey’s chin or Dokey’s mouth. This neighborhood son was a stranger to him, or a mystery at least. “Do you remember what I told you?” he asked Jimmy.

“Yes,” said Jimmy. “I’m on it.” He glanced quickly at Kevin and then returned his stare to Daredevil’s chest. “Do you remember what I told you?”

“Uh ... no.” Daredevil said. “What was that?”

“Oh, I think you remember.” Jimmy’s hands were balled into fists and his ears were turning red. Kevin hoped they weren’t going to fight. He had a feeling he knew who would win.

“I’m sorry.” The cowl made it hard to read his expression, but he tilted his head to the side as if he were confused. “I don’t know.”

“You know,” Jimmy forced out. “I know you do.”

Daredevil shrugged. “Honestly, I don’t.”

There was a long, waiting pause. “I told you,” Jimmy said at last, “that Alo Onatero and Dokey Farrell are through in this neighborhood. They’re not in charge here anymore. Isn’t that right?”

Daredevil straightened his shoulders. “Well, I don’t remember that you --”

“Is it true or isn’t it!?” Jimmy broke in fiercely.

“Yes.” said Daredevil. “It’s true. I promise. I’ll take care of them. Don’t worry. ” He looked from Jimmy to Kevin and back. “You’re brothers?”

“You know that,” Jimmy said. “We’re Donnellys.”

Daredevil looked confused again, but turned to Kevin. “Take care of him,” he said. “Your brother is taking on something very difficult. He needs all the support from you he can get.”

“Yes,” said Kevin. He tried to concentrate on the mouth and remember the voice. He wanted to recognize them when he met them again. “Yes, sir. I know.”

Jimmy waited until after he was gone to hit him. By now, the shadows were getting long in the alleys and a tow truck had come to take away the first of the cars from the accident. The envelope of payoff money from the juice tucked in Kevin’s waistband itched. Some guys from Sanitation were sweeping the glass into big piles.

“Ow,” said Kevin, rubbing the side of his head. “What was that for?”

“Dumbass. You don’t say ‘sir.’”

“Huh?” Kevin said. “Why not? He’s our neighbor.”

FIN.


End file.
